The biggest segment was cloud advertising, covering nearly 48% of the total cloud services market in 2012. Next was cloud business process services segment (BPaaS), which covers 28% of the total cloud market. Cloud application services or software as a service (SaaS) takes third spot, with at 14.7% share.

The biggest surge in 2013 would be in the Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) segment. This include sub-segments such as cloud storage, cloud computing, and cloud print services. This segment, having a 5.5% share of the total cloud services in 2012, would grow by 47.3% and become worth $9 billion, up from $6.1 billion in 2012.

The growth would be fuelled mainly by large-scale migration to the cloud. By the end of 2013, even production systems and workloads, and product development and testing, which have largely stayed aloof from the cloud, would start migrating to the cloud.

North America would continue having the largest number of cloud service adopters, with 59% of all new spending taking place here. Western Europe comes a distant second, with a 24% share of all cloud service spending. The emerging regions Asia/Pacific, such as Indonesia, India, China and also Latin America would have minor shares, but starting from a narrow base, would have the highest growth rates, and offer much potential.

While cloud services is poised for incredible growth in 2013, regulatory issues, local economic factors, local political climate, and many other factors unique to the specific country or region will act as inhibitors of growth, and make it imperative to consider each country or region separately.